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Friday, January 6, 2012

Save the Rhinos (and RINOs)

My wife and I attended a cousin’s wedding in Cape Town,
South Africa at year-end and added some time to be tourists in a country we’d
never visited. The sites we saw ranged from the black township of Khayelitsha
(on a van tour led by a local), where brick houses are slowly replacing tin
shacks, to the well-manicured grounds of an elite high school (where our
cousin-by-marriage was one of the first two colored, or mixed-race, students
upon desegregation in the early 1990s; he studied particularly hard to show
academic standards were not slipping on his account, and became valedictorian).

We spent the trip’s closing days at the Aquila Private Game Reserve, a sprawling site two hours’ drive from Cape Town. There, amid many
other animals, we saw the southern white rhinoceros in its native habitat. The
five rhinos on the reserve were all females, the site’s two males having been
killed gruesomely by poachers in August. Rhino horn, valued for putative
medicinal properties, makes a lucrative illegal trade in China, Vietnam and
elsewhere.

Now, as a FrumForum contributor, I have been called a RINO
(Republican in Name Only) and even taken a liking to that term (while scorning
the RINO-baiters’ presumption of defining who’s a Republican). The magnificence
of real-life rhinos gives the RINO label a cachet that defeats its derisive
purpose.

The rhinos’ plight, unfortunately, is a severe one. Africa’s
western black rhino has been declared extinct in the wild, and East Asia’s
Javan rhino is close to meeting the same fate. As formidable as rhinos look,
they have little defense against poachers carrying weapons and chainsaws (to
cut off the horns, often leaving the animals alive and in agony).

At night, from our cabin at the Aquila reserve, we saw
distant headlights of the security patrols that follow rhinos to protect
against poachers. It’s a dangerous business, in which the armed “anti-poachers”
easily can be targeted themselves.

Private reserves such as Aquila have been a valuable
supplement to Africa’s national parks; the latter have military protection but
are vulnerable to budget pressures and corruption. The private reserves,
though, need stepped-up security. In response to the August attack, Aquila launched
an initiative called “Saving Private Rhino,” to develop funding and support for
measures including high-tech surveillance systems; rewards for informants; GPS
tracking of microchips in rhino horns; educational centers and more.

Defending rhinos through private property rights and
innovative technologies is a cause that should appeal to the conservative
imagination, and it’s one that resonates with the longstanding conservationist
tradition of Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt. Let RINOs help protect
rhinos and ensure their survival through the 21st century.